The Pattern
Why Universities Don't Move
Universities have three constraints no other industry faces: procurement cycles measured in years, faculty governance over technology decisions, and student information systems that predate the web itself. A CMS migration at a university isn't a tech project — it's a political campaign.
The Cost of Not Moving
Student data on WordPress. Research data on Drupal 7 (EOL). Application portals on legacy PHP. Every one of these is a data protection incident waiting to happen. FERPA in the US, GDPR in Europe, DPDP in India — education institutions face the same compliance pressure as healthcare, with less budget and slower governance.